“And at the same time as this I’ve been working upon my novel Jerusalem which is at the moment on a pretty spectacular chapter where I’ve got a massive four dimensional hallway up above the world that is only above one area of the world geographically but it is above it in every particular moment of time. So it’s this immense hallway, two miles wide, a mile high, and running down it is a naked old man with a naked 18 month old baby girl riding on his shoulders, and they’re running down the length of time and they are seeing the big freeze when the Greenland ice shelf melts and the Gulf Stream stops, and then a bit further on there’s a sort of a more jungly area, where presumably the warming of the planet has kind of counteracted the cooling down that would happen in these latitudes if the Gulf Stream were to stop, and you’ve got post-humans, genetically engineered to survive in a world with less food, and then after a few more thousand years of pounding down this corridor there’s no more people any more. And then you start to get mega-fauna that have come up from the drying oceans, giant squids that are using their bodies as basically digital televisions, using the pigment cells in their skin to mimic their surroundings, and land whales that look as if they’re part goat! Because I found out that apparently when whales came up on to land for the first time, the thing that they were closest to genetically was the goat. So I’ve got these horned whales with hooves, dragging themselves through these clearings, you know, towards the end of time.”

I just finished rereading Moore’s first novel Voice of the Fire. It’s easily one of the top five favorite books on my shelf. I cannot wait to get my hands on “Jerusalem”.

Read the whole interview here.

Alan Moore on Harvey from Estate of Harvey L. Pekar on Vimeo.

(Guess what I just bought me’n the missus for Christmas…)

But I can’t, because I’m meant to be getting on an airplane. That doesn’t stop my mind from working as I drive through the darkened city, passing empty office buildings lit from within like empty stages waiting for their actors to come on.

It occurs the me that ghosts must be on a different schedule than the rest of us. They must like the quiet an solitude of the late night hours, the early morning when they can wander through the empty offices and, for just a little while, pretend.

I see then sitting at desks, pretending to answer phone calls or file reports… Or wander into the kitchen an open the fridge, just to stand and stare for a while…

I know how that feels.

***

Last week I asked my wife “What do you think ghosts do more, watch the living have sex or watch us eat?”

Neither of us had the answer. But I expect we’ll find out, eventually.

***

In the security line, twenty young men stand and chat together in identical black suits. Each wears a different colored shirt, open at the color. They are cheerful and businesslike.

One of them is wearing headphones shaped like pandas, bobbing his head. I don’t think he’s going to last in this job, whatever it is.

***

We land in the midst of what I can only assume is a tropical storm clearing its throat, getting ready to speak its mind.

My room is on the 27th floor. I can feel the hotel sway under my feet as I unpack.

I discover that the sliding glass door actually opens. I’ve got free access to the wind and rain and, if I were so inclined, gravity as well. This surprises me.

There is a Gideon Bible and a Book of Mormon in the nightstand. Above, my copy of The Hermetic Museum sits next to the alarm clock.

I brought it along to research a possible project for NaNoWriMo. This will turn out to be an empty gesture, as I will get nothing done while I am here.

***

Up early the next morning for a day full of meetings followed by a night out with my colleagues and clients.

They ply me with rum — it is Florida, after all — but I demur. “If I’m going to fall of the wagon, it’s going to be for Irish whiskey.”

Other people in our party are drinking watermelon mojitos. I rest my fucking case.

Fortunately, a bartender that looks uncommonly like Ray Stevenson is more than happy to provide me with Bushmills. He does not sneer when I ask for soda.

One drink in and I find that I’m explaining to a high-priced and pretty-damn-smart consultant that all modern brands are merely an extension of celebrity which is, in turn, nothing more than a modern manifestation of the shift from the Pantheon to demigods and, as a marketer, he’s a modern acolyte or (since he bills at a higher rate than I) quite possibly a priest.

“All culture derives from cult,” I say, quoting Alan Moore — and not for the first time, neither.

The consultant nods and looks away, entirely uninterested in my metaphysical plagiarism.

I sip my drink and think about how much I missed whiskey and didn’t even know it. Until now.

Dinner is delicious. Living in the midwest for the past fifteen years or so, I’d forgotten how clean and fresh seafood and shellfish could be when you were on the coast — that is, when I lived on the coast . . . the west coast. A long time ago.

I’m meant to be contacting family in Florida and connecting up. But my schedule with clients is proving unsympathetic to those plans. Even the social times are turning out to be important conversations with clients. In fact, the most important one I have during the whole trip takes place in the upstairs of a nightclub. We shout back and forth while, down below, women stand on the bar and dance to live salsa music.

***

The rest of my time is spent in my hotel room, looking out the window and waiting to go home.

And, to everyone everywhere else… you should all go make a donation to the NZ Red Cross right now.

Seriously. They need all the help they can get.

——-

Everything is slightly off-kilter these days. I’ve been finding it difficult to stay awake much past 10pm and, if I do manage it, all I seem capable of doing is staring at the television — whether it is switched on or not. In fact, a blank wall will do just as well.

As a result, my usually predictable writing schedule has been stuck in first gear, grinding and whining and producing inordinate amounts of psychological smoke to blanket my mind in thick, cloying fumes.

Mostly, I just want to sleep.

This is uncommon for me. All I can think is that, despite my deep and abiding love of winter, I’m somehow suffering from some mild seasonal affect disorder or a soul-crunching depression brought on by B-vitamin deficiency. This seems unlikely, as I have spent fifteen winters in the Midwest with no perceivable ill-effects. But perhaps it is cumulative.

Possibly I am only dying.

It was in this condition that I wrote a fairly long post that began I’ve been thinking about belief a lot lately… but after a week of poking these concept with the blunt stick that is my current mind, I gained enough lucidity to recognize it as the diseased offspring of a crippled animal and had it put down.

Why I was so fixated on this for a while escapes me. It had something to do with Scientology, though. And Science Fiction authors. And leaving people’s beliefs alone. I forget the rest.

Trust me, you have missed out on nothing.

I also wrote a long essay on the work of fanboy-favorite-who-will-one-day-be-exposed-for-the-charlatan-he-is Grant Morrison detailing why the rumor of him taking a crack at Captain Marvel fills me with nothing short of Jihadist-level rage.

That too was a post best left unpublished. Even mentioning it here is dodgy enough. Morrison fans can sometimes be a little aggressive in their preservation of the Emperor’s wardrobe.

And so, in the tradition of The Bloggess, I humbly offer the following Shit I Did When I When My Brain Wasn’t Here.

(It’s an homage, dammit. Be glad I didn’t use the picture of me in hair curlers.)

Meet Marshall
If you want to know what the by-product of my aforementioned mental condition looks like, check out the latest episode of The Gospel of Thomas. In addition to a thankfully brief audio version of my blog post on belief, you get a sneak preview from my forthcoming novel Pantheon. The episode was originally meant to be posted for the holidays late last year but, again, my brain betrayed me. It sat on my hard drive for a few weeks before I realized that it hadn’t actually been posted. By way of penance, I included a longer section from the book as well.

There’s plenty more where that came from, of course. So consider subscribing to the show via iTunes or RSS, won’t you?

“Dad? Are you famous yet?”
There’s been a fan page out on Facebook for a while now — which is really important and relevant these days, what with all that stuff in the media about those people revoluting and whatnot in the Mid East. Every time you click the “like” button, a dictator falls. At least, that’s what they keep saying on the news.

(My daughter asked me the question. Let’s not let the little lady down, folks…)

Neil Gaiman, Pirate
“You’re not losing sales by getting stuff out there. When I do a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people ask “What about the sales you are losing by having stuff floating out there?” I started asking the audience to raise their hands for one question — Do you have a favorite author? And they say yes and I say good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book put up your hand. Then anybody who discovered their favorite author by walking into a book story and buying a book. And it’s probably about 5-10%, if that, of the people who discovered their favorite author who is the person they buy everything of and they buy the hardbacks. And they treasure the fact they’ve got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it. That’s how they found their favorite author. And that’s really all this is; it’s people lending books.”

(Okay, not really. But I thought this interview was fascinating. More and more, these ideas — Free Economic Models, Independent Publishing, Crowdsourced Project Financing, etc. — are making their way into mainstream discussions. This is a good thing.)

Alan Moore, Hero
“I am very concerned about the kids today which might grow up without this access. I am very against taking literacy away from people. Education must not be a privilege for the well-off.”

Amen to that.

If only every endangered library had their very own magician to protect them, the world would be a better place.

(Yep. Definitely a hero.)

Reports of My Being Boring Were Greatly Exaggerated
I’ve been reading The Autobiography of Mark Twain — well, I’ve been listening to it — and I’m somewhat surprised to find that I’m enjoying it. After all of the faintly negative response on the publication last month, I was prepared for a real grind. But something told me that maybe, just maybe, all of the grumbling from critics had less to do with Twain and more to do with certain academic axes they had to grind.

What you’ve heard is true. Yes, the non-Twain introduction and textual explanations are fairly tedious. Yes, it’s a haphazard bundle of rough notes, dictation, and digressions that, in many cases, even Twain didn’t necessarily intend to publish. Yes, fine.

It’s also great.

The actual writing is, for the most part, electrifying. Even when mired in the mundane, Twain’s prose is startlingly good.* And he’s often laugh-out-loud funny. His ability to turn a compliment into an insult, like a trapeze artist effortlessly performing a mid-air flip, is amazing. I imagine that anyone on the receiving end of one of these would sit there with his mouth open and feel fortunate that the Great One took the time to even notice his existence.

I’m only about halfway through right now. The best part so far has been Twain’s response to a friend who did some edits to an essay without asking first. Twain spends a fair amount of time thanking him for his efforts and, with increasing venom, lambasting his audacity and ignorance.

It’s been a while since I mentioned it but…
…today is the Twenty-third of February.

Omnia mutantur nos et mutamur in illis, y’all.

And finally…
…I wasn’t kidding around. Go make a donation to the New Zealand Red Cross.

——-

* Opinions may vary. But I’m totally right about Grant Morrison.

From the How to Make My Day Dept.
Over at SFF Audio a few weeks back, three very nice people saw fit to devote a fair amount of time to heaping praise all over “Assam & Darjeeling”.

Click here to listen to the squee-worthy episode. They cover a lot of interesting topics in each show, so it’s well worth subscribing to.

Take Your Pick
It’s official. “Assam & Darjeeling” is now available for your iPad. Just search for it in the iBooks store. In case you’re keeping track: You can now read it in paperback, hardcover, on your Kindle, iPhone, iPad, or listen to the free audiobook. Hell, ask me nicely and I’ll pop ’round and act it out in your basement, den, or rumpus room.

A few people have asked and yes, there will be an iBook/iPad version of Matters of Mortology as well. Look for it sometime around Hallowe’en.

Correction
Apparently some crazy person snuck in and added a few lines of insanity to one of my recent posts, promising a new book this summer.

The aforementioned lunatic has been apprehended and is currently locked in the basement awaiting extradition to the attic.

So. No new book this year. We apologize for the inconvenience.

The Intermittent Wossname
For those of you who are wondering about the new baby, those darn eyes appear to be getting bigger and bluer by the day. It’s hereditary so there’s probably nothing to be done. She’ll just have to learn to live with ‘em.

From the Like I Don’t Have Enough to Do Dept.
I’ve never gone in for National Novel Writing Month. When it rolls around each year, I’ve always got a project in the works and don’t want to slow down or take a month off. Also, a month seems like a very short amount of time to, y’know, write a whole damn book. But it’s what all the cool kids are doing these days.

As it stands right now, I just might find myself in a spot to participate this year. It’s a hard call. I really ought to kickstart “Pantheon” once again — woefully neglected during all the new babyness of the past few months — but there’s a faint echo in the back of my head that could turn out to be a very nice little book, something that’s possible to crank through in a month. Especially if I break the rules a teensy bit, which I just might do.

And I very much like the idea of having something new this year.

(I know, I said no new book this year. But we’ll see…)

Spreading the Good News
But if you’re hankering for something new to read from Your Obedient Savant, might I recommend a semi-steady diet of short, easily consumed pieces from The Gospel of Thomas? Each episode is lovingly prepared and served up piping hot. And our handy downloadable PDF provides carry-out curbside service to keep pace with your modern on-the-go lifestyle.

We’ve already got a handful of episodes out there, with a lot more in the works: Everything from poetry to plays to short stories to odd little things that don’t quite fit anywhere else. In addition, I’ll be giving listeners sneak peeks (sneak listens?) at a brand new Jee story as well as sections from my new novel “Pantheon” in progress.

Exciting stuff.

Broadcast News
And speaking of Listening to Things That Sound A Lot Like Me, there’s been a big surge in listeners to all of my podcasts/audiobooks.

Since October of 2009, “Assam & Darjeeling” has seen over 14,000 downloads from all around the world. We’ve only been tracking for a year or so, but the book has been out there since 2007 — which is when it was first offered as a free audiobook/podcast download on iTunes. So it’s safe to assume that those numbers are potentially much, much higher.

Unfortunately, the data for “Matters of Mortology” appears to be corrupted and I don’t have entirely reliable data to share. I’m just going to say “lots and lots” of people have been downloading it since 2008 when it first launched. But don’t let that stop you from giving it a listen (iTunes or RSS).

My latest podcast is an anthology show called The Gospel of Thomas (which you should already know about from reading the blurb above, unless you weren’t really paying attention). It’s been running since May of this year, with approximately 1,000 downloads so far. You can subscribe to it on iTunes as well or listen via RSS.

Yay. Aren’t numbers fun?

The Book of Love
A few weeks back I had this idea that it might be fun to start up an online book club — just a little group of us getting together online to chat about a book or two. I put out a few feelers and enough people chimed in with some interest, so we took the plunge.

Our first book is Kij Johnson’s excellent The Fox Woman and the conversation’s just getting started over in our new Forums section.

Even if you’re a little bit behind, it’s not too late to pick up a copy of the book and join us. Glad to have you along.

(And we’re looking for other books to read in our next round, so throw one of your own favorites into the mix.)

“She is Theology in Flames”
Imagine you’re best friends with the reigning mad genius of comicdom, the author of seminal works that, twenty odd years later, continue to dominate best seller lists and inspire generations of new readers, artists, and writers… Best friends with a self-proclaimed magus who stages public workings, exploring and exposing the parallels between quantum physics and the Kabbalah, among other topics… And imagine he sets his sights on your life story, tracing your own winding path up the Tree of Life, eavesdropping on your (albeit a mad enterprise in it’s own right) wooing of the moon goddess Selene.

“Unearthing” — Alan Moore’s latest work (and possibly his latest working, I can’t quite say) employs all of his storytelling magic (literally) in the exploration of his boyhood chum Stephen Moore (no relation). A study in the evolution of a powerdork (not a pejorative term, I assure you), “Unearthing” moves through the strata of human existence — from the physical to more ethereal realms.

The piece hinges on a late-night invocation of the goddess Selene — a startling and puzzling episode late in the story that exposes more questions than it answers. Whatever might have happened on that night in Alan Moore’s Northampton flat, it’s clear from his account that something most certainly happened — a shared numinous experience that not even drugs or insanity can explain away.

It’s an amazing work, difficult to classify and certainly not something that every listener will find accessible. Like his other workings, Alan Moore so densely layers the images and language in “Unearthing” that a single listen leaves you with anecdotes and impressions, whereas repeated playings deepen the experience to the point where you occupy the mind of each Moore in turn — the lonely wandering in search of his goddess . . . and the acute observer chronicling the journey, even as he drifts from the role of spectator into that of participant.

“Unearthing” serves as the latest layer in Alan Moore’s exploration of the mystical levels of consciousness. Glimmers of it appear in his early work on Swamp Thing, complimented by brief flashes in Watchmen before he picks up momentum in his masterpiece From Hell. For a shorthand overview of his creative and magical mindset, there is the excellent “Mindscape” documentary (available on iTunes and Amazon).

But the purest expression of his mystic evolution and exploration is found in his “workings” — verbal performances to which the label “spoken word” does not do justice. Most of his previous workings are available on CD either through Top Shelf Publishing or for astronomically ridiculous prices on eBay.

Fortunately, “Unearthing” is much easier to get a hold of. You can either spring for the deluxe, limited edition box set from Lex Records or download the stripped down audio version from iTunes.

I tend to think that what fame has done is to replace the sea as the element of choice of adventure for young people. If you were a dashing young man in the 19th century you would probably have wanted to run away to sea, just as in the 20th century you might decide that you want to runaway and form a pop band. The difference is that in the 19th century, before running away to sea, you would have had at least some understanding of the element that you were dealing with and would have perhaps, say, learned to swim.

The thing is that there is no manual for how to cope with fame. So you’ll get some, otherwise likeable young person, who has done one good comic book, one good film, one good record, suddenly told that they are a genius, who believes it and who runs out laughing and splashing into the billows of celebrity, and whose heroin-sodden corpse is washed up a few weeks later in the shallows of the tabloids.

—Alan Moore

“The enemy of most authors is not piracy but obscurity.”

A few days back, Dave Charest posted that on Twitter, perfectly encapsulating a line of thought that’s been haunting me for the past nine months or so.

More on this a bit lower down in the post…

* * * * * *

In all honesty, I didn’t plan on taking a Summer Hiatus — and, really, given the amount of work I’ve gotten done over the past few months, I still could use a vacation. But if I went off somewhere for a week, you can bet I’d spend most of it writing.

Once the dust settled after moving earlier in the summer, I got sidetracked by the aforementioned secret science fiction project. If you’ve been following along on Twitter or Facebook, then you already know that the project is a comic book treatment/proposal called “Chimera” and that it’s been sent off to my friends in Singapore. So we’ll see where that goes.

(Speaking of which, let me offer a belated “Welcome to the World” to the lovely and perfect Ms. Prudence. And congratulations to her excellent parents, Gavin and WeeNee. Nice work.)

Interestingly enough, since completing the preliminary outline and scripts for this project, I’ve found a handful of upcoming movies and comics that share some of the same elements. There’s no direct correlation, just some interesting thematic parallels and plot points. But I gave up on getting frustrated by that sort of thing a long time ago. We’re all tapped into the same frequencies, so it’s no surprise when we resonate along similar lines.

In the documentary The Mindscape of Alan Moore, this is referred to as “Idea Space” and that’s just as good a way to think about it as anything else.

(For certain kinds of brains, that movie is a mind-stretching experience. I recommend it.)

Any time I didn’t spend on “Chimera” over the past few months was spent working on a poem.

That’s right. One poem.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time on this particular poem. And all I have to show for it are about twenty-three pages of handwritten gibberish, incomplete villanelle rhyming schemes, and no poem.

I am mad at this poem. It is in a time-out right now and if it’s very good, I might let it out someday.

Bah.

I also finally finished a new play that had been languishing on the back burner for what I thought would only be a few months but which, surprisingly, turned out to be a few years. But it’s done now and once I tweak some formatting, I’ll be posting it here for one and all to enjoy.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that it isn’t actually a new play at all. Truth be told, it’s actually a complete reworking of the first play I ever wrote. Hard to believe, but that was over twenty years ago. And the idea/premise for the play is even older, going back almost thirty years.

I always felt like that premise deserved somewhat better than what my nineteen-year-old self was able to do with it. A few years back something shifted inside my head and I said “Yeah… that could work.” So I threw out most of the story and characters, retooled everything, kept the bits that worked, and put it all into the hands of a girl named Elizabeth to see what she would do with it. As a character, Liz surprised the hell out of me and I’ve grown as fond of her as anyone I’ve ever written.

Most surprisingly, the things that didn’t work in the first version of the script — all those things I wanted to resolve and repair — are still present and problematic in this latest version. I’d blame Liz, but it’s obviously the writer’s fault.

At any rate, the name of the play is “Drawing Away” and I’ll be posting it sometime this coming weekend. Stay tuned for details.

In the midst of all of this, an old acquaintance from college got in touch via Facebook. Usually getting pinged by someone from the past is a bit of a mixed bag (I’ve whined about this before) but, for many reasons, that wasn’t the case this time. And, in a surprising degree of coincidence and convergence, twenty years ago this acquaintance had played the lead in the original version of the play that I’d just finished retooling. Coincidence? Alan Moore probably has something to say about that sort of thing as well.

Somewhere, I’ve got a VHS of that play floating around. I’ll try to pull a scene or two and post them here. If nothing else, there’s a high degree of nostalgia for me. That was at the beginning of it all, one of a very few specific milestones that I can point to and say “There. That’s when I felt my life shift on its axis.”

But, for once, I didn’t resent Facebook for reconnecting me with someone from the past.

As many of you know, I have a day job working in Advertising. Most of my time is spent helping my clients navigate the thorny paths of various online mechanisms for connecting with their audiences, customers, and so on. I’m reasonably competent at what I do, fortunately. And it’s a fairly enjoyable way to earn a living.

In the past month or so, I’ve had the opportunity to help one of my clients take their first little baby steps into social networking. What this means is that, for all intents and purposes, I’m spending a couple of hours a day on Twitter and Facebook as my client. Actually, there are three different and distinct brands that I’m managing, across two different networks (that’s six accounts total). I’ve got seven different browser tabs open at all times, a 3×3 TweetGrid that runs real time searches on related terms, and an ever-evolving strategy for helping my client participate in these conversations in a way that’s meaningful, human, and worthwhile.

It is, as you might imagine, a hell of a lot to keep straight onscreen — to say nothing of inside my chronically porous little Gemini brain. And I still have difficulty coming to terms with the concept that I get paid to do this sort of thing.

Fortunately, they haven’t heard about “Stripper Friday”.

Not a bad gig, really — at least, it’ll do until that whole “Writer” thing ramps up.

Although it does remind me of the old “First you do it for love…” thing.

And on that note, back to the beginning…

I have a couple of semi-announcements to share.

First off, I recently put together a portable sound studio similar to this one. Which means that, over time, I’m going to (a) Re-record both “Assam & Darjeeling” and “Matters of Mortology” to improve the overall production quality and clean up the rough edges in the original recordings; and (b) Begin a new podcast with an open format more suited to conversation, interviews, and shorter pieces. The re-recording could take a few months, of course. But I expect the new podcast to kick off sometime in October.

Second, if you’re one of the many people who’s written to me about getting ahold of a copy of either “Matters of Mortology” or “Assam & Darjeeling” that you can hold in your hands and read with your whaddyacall actual eyes, then good news is on the way. Starting with “Mortology” in a few weeks, both books will be released in a variety of formats: Softcover, Hardcover, PDF, and a few of the eBook readers (Amazon’s Kindle is for sure, the Sony Reader is a possibility as well).

It’s an . . . experiment, of a sort. I’m very interested to see how it goes.

Watch this space for details.

* * * * * *

Speaking of which, it’s time now for something I really should do more often…

I met author Tony Delgrosso on Twitter some long while back. Not sure how we connected but he’s clever and funny, so I bet that had something to do with it. Sometime last year, Tony began publishing his novel “Mr. Abernathy” online in installments. It’s a fun yarn and Delgrosso does a good job taking some of the classic thriller elements (Secret Nazi research, time travel, and [maybe?] UFO technology) and crafts an enjoyable, engaging book out of them. I wrote a review for it on GoodReads, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it here as well.

Another reason I like this book is that it’s from an author taking steps to promote his work outside of the traditional (and increasingly, frustratingly hermetically-sealed) publishing industry. It’s a bit inspiring and, like the man said, “it is a comfort to the unfortunate to have companions in woe.”

You can pick up a copy of Tony Delgrosso’s “Mr. Abernathy” online.

Lying in bed a few weeks back I found myself drifting in and out of a vague dream about a clone on the run from some sort of shadowy government agency. In my half-waking mind, the components of a story started to come together. Upon waking, I was surprised to discover that it held together pretty well. For a few days afterward, I’d find myself returning to the idea and playing with it further.

After a week or so, it occurred to me that I’d (quite by accident) developed an actual, honest-to-goodness idea for a series — well suited to either television, animation, or comics. The closest thing I can compare it to is Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing — but I should probably leave it at that, for now.

I say “by accident” because it’s not the sort of thing I do on purpose. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever done it before. Although I’ve had ideas for individual episodes or issues of an already established, ongoing series — the world will perhaps never know the joy of watching, for instance, my “lost” season of Mad Men — I’ve never really come up with something new that was obviously an ongoing series.

The reason for this is, I think, because most of what I read is finite. Novels, plays, short stories, poetry — they all have an ending. Even in the world of comics, my favorite series tend to be the ones that are standalone volumes or finite storylines: Sandman, Cerebus, From Hell, Promethea, the various Gaiman/McKean collaborations, etc. As I’ve gotten older (no, I won’t say “matured”) as a reader, I’ve found the endless story arcs, crossovers, and reboots in most of the mainstream comics increasingly tedious and even insulting.

So it’s strange to have this sort of story coming together in my head . . . but it’s also a lot of fun, as well.

And it’s perfect timing, really. My work on Pantheon has been a little slow of late, as it’s difficult to find the time with everything else going on. We’re moving households in about a week and it always seems that there’s something else that needs to get done first. But it’s been good to have a nice little idea to play with for a while. Once things settle down a bit, I expect to have a strong outline and treatment that I can share with a few connections. After that, we’ll see where it goes.

It’s been nice too, talking about it with Keeley. My current project (the aforementioned Pantheon) began life as a collaboration with her. So it’s been fun to tell her what I’m thinking and then bounce ideas back and forth. In addition to the clarity that comes from simply talking over a story with someone else, she’s given me a lot of little things to consider around various chacters and plot points. I’ll owe her a story credit, when the time comes.

It’s a science fiction story, by the way — at least, on one level it is — and that’s a nice change as well since that’s not a genre I usually spend much time in (either reading or writing). I wouldn’t say it’s hard SF, at all. It’s more of a technological thriller, which sounds a bit odd even to me. Again, not typically the sort of thing my mind immediately comes up with.

But, so far, it’s working for me. At the very least it’s a good exercise to go through in the midst of the moving cyclone.

By my last count, I think I’ve moved about 20 times in my life (that’s 20 separate residences, not including different dorm rooms in college). At the time, it never seemed like that much . . . but it adds up, apparently. The end result is that I’m very, very good at packing. Especially books. There’s about forty-five boxes of them now.

Also, it’s taught me how to plan ahead so that the week leading up to the day when the truck shows up isn’t a hectic mess of last-minute preparation and stress. Oddly enough, we’re only moving one block away. That’s all. But you still have to go through everything, no matter the distance. So I’m disrupting my life, my writing schedule, my peace of mind, and the delicate psychic landscape of my offspring to go one block south.

But we need the room. The kids are getting bigger and we’re all starting to bump into each other a bit more than before. And sometime next year our family is likely to get even bigger, so there’s that to plan for as well. The timing couldn’t have been better. Just as we started getting serious about looking, our landlord had a bigger place open up down the street. That it has a pool table in the basement wasn’t the only deciding factor, I assure you. But it did help take the sting out of the idea of moving again.

As did the realization* that, with a little bit of imagination and some elbow grease, I could have an office again. It’s been a long time since I had a separate space where I could spread out and work — the past few years, I’ve set up shop at the kitchen table after everyone’s gone to bed. It’s been fine (I got two books and a full length play done that way, after all) but it’ll be nice to have things be a bit more grounded.

(It’s also the room right next to where the pool table is, so that’s okay.)

*It wasn’t my realization, of course. I’d been thinking that the back room would end up being storage. Keeley was the one you said “You know this could be an office…” and, as usual, she was absolutely right.

Out at Aurohn Lake last week, I got the chance to prove my devotion to her. Down near the southeast side of the lake there’s a spring where watercress grows in thick, abundant beds. The terrain gets a little swampy down there and one wrong step will find you sinking fast. No one’s entirely clear on how deep the mud goes, but (as I found out later) the rumor is that a cow was lost down there back when the angus beef farm was still in operation.

While Keeley was picking her ‘cress, I went off to take some photos of an interesting mold formation on a nearby tree. Coming back, I watched her shift position and loose her footing. She grabbed an overhead branch and I immediately went into rescue mode, taking one huge step into the seemingly solid center of the watercress.

I sank immediately and my knee boots were suddenly filled with water and mud. Trying to pull out one leg only made the other sink deeper. My main concern was that if I sank to my waist, my camera and my iPhone would be ruined.

As I am somewhat smarter than a cow, I was able to get back to solid ground eventually — all without losing my precious tech, but soaked from the thighs down. As I dumped the gallons of water and mud out of my boots, my only regret was that we didn’t capture the whole thing on video. Ah well, next time…

I will say this: based on the salad my wife made later that night, the watercress was well worth the risk.

But this was a bit of a surprise. I’d heard of it and I’d made some assumptions . . . but, well, this was a side of Alan I hadn’t really counted on.